The Daily Stoic - “Not Much” Adds Up | Circle of Control

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

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Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epipetus Markus, really a Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target,

the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Not much adds up. We all have something difficult we're trying to accomplish. Whether it's starting a business or losing weight, finishing a creative project or building a barn, the mammoth task sits before us. The very thought of its enormity is overwhelming.

The thought of completing it, we can't even fathom. A light at the end of the tunnel is nowhere in sight. What should you do? Do with the great and prolific author Rich Cohen does on the Daily Stoke podcast a while back. Rich explained how he's been able to so consistently be productive at such a high level. Nine books so far, many of them bestsellers. He said he approaches a big project like the approaches across country road trip. The way you deal with long road trips, he said, is you set yourself a minimum number of hours a day, no matter how you feel. The point is that not much adds up if you do it a lot. And that's what Marcus meant when he said,

don't let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. All you have to do, he said, is stick with the situation at hand. He talks about how you assemble your life action by action. No one, he says, can stop you from that. But this metaphor, the road is a good one because excellence is a road. And there is a road to being a successful writer or entrepreneur, to that promoter, to that award,

the road to finishing this task or that project. How do you travel a road? Travel a road in steps. A certain number of miles or hours per day. Excelling at anything is a matter of taking one step then another after another. One foot in front of the other. Even when you don't feel like it, even when it feels like it's not making much of a dent, because it is. You're getting closer. Eventually, you will arrive, and it will be wonderful. And that is what Xenoment, when he said, well-being, is realized by small steps, but it is no small thing. The circle of control. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic 366

Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours Truly, and my co-author and translator, Steve Enhancelman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store, over a million copies of the Daily Stoic and print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the best cellist. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoke.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. We control our reasoned choice and all acts that depend on that moral will. What's not under our control are the body and any of its parts are

possessions, parents, siblings, children, country or anything else with which we might associate. That's epic tea. This is discourses 1-22. This is an important enough entry that it bears repeating. A wise person knows what's inside of their circle of control and what's outside it. Remember, this is the very first entry in the Daily Stoke, which again, saying that it's worth repeating, I think I will. The chief task in life is simply this, to identify and separate matters so I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control and what have to do with the choices I actually control?

Where then do I look for good and evil, not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself, to the choices that are my own? The good news is that it's pretty easy to remember what's inside your control. According to the Stoics, the circle of control contains just one thing.

Your mind. That's right. Not even your physical body is completely within your control. After all, you could be struck with a physical illness or an impairment at any moment. You could be traveling in a foreign country and thrown in jail. But this is all good news because it drastically reduces the amount of things that we need to think about. There is clarity in this simplicity. While everyone else is running around with a list of responsibilities a mile long, things that are not actually responsible for,

you have just got that one item list. You've just got one thing to manage. Your choices, your will, your mind. So mind it. And I said this in my talks many times, but I think about the circle of control as a kind of resource allocation issue. Right? If you've got 100 energy points, where are you going to spend them? Are you going to spend 50 of them on what's in your control and then 50% of them complaining about how you got there, wishing things were otherwise, trying to change things so you don't control, or are you going to spend all your energy on what you do control, right? So, if the typical ratio of a person is 50-50 and that's probably being

generous, if we're being perfectly honest, and you can get to a 60-40, that's a huge advantage. I mean, God forbid you get to 90-10. I don't know how possible that really is, but if again, just any you can move from one category to another category, it's not just saving the energy from beating your head against a wall that will not budge or wishing something that did happen, hadn't happened. But you're moving it to the category where it does make a difference towards something where that energy does make progress.

So it's a shoot. It's more than a one point shift. It's an enormous shift. And you have to think about it that way. And again, taking it as a stipulating that the vast majority of people struggle to do this, they're not even aware that they're doing it. You think about how basic the serenity prayer is, right? If you think about how basic something like the serenity prayer is,

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can in the wisdom to know the difference. Right? They say that in alcoholics and onoms, these are people who've lived their entire life. Some of them are very successful. Some of them have tried literally every other thing on the planet. But this, right? And I think to me, that's just a humbling reminder of how much time energy life force is spent on things that we don't control, right? We care about what other people are doing.

We care about the weather. We care about, you care about external results. I just, I try to remind myself of this as a writer over and over again, I control the work. I control what I write today. I control that I showed up. I control what I do, my choices, my mind, what I put in it. Everything else that comes after might be nice,

might break my way, but it's not up to me. That's not what we're talking about. We control our reasoned choice and all acts that depend on moral will. What's not under our control or the body and any of its parts are possessions, our parents, our siblings, our children, our country. Anything else, anything with which we might associate. And again, this is a humbling, it's a little depressing reminder as you stare at where the world is on this day. But think about what that was for Epic Titus, what was happening in Rome or Greece as he was saying these things. So instead he focused on his mental freedom, on his choices, on his actions, because that's all he could do.

And in so doing, he made himself one of the most powerful people in the world, even though he was very powerless inside the Roman hierarchy. He made himself so powerful that his words echo down to us today. All these years later, I hope you take them to heart, hope you focus on what's in your control today, and hope you have a great week. And so far, as you focus on things that are up to you. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. You just go to dailystoke.com slash email. So check it out dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke early and add free on Amazon music.

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